Give our politicians an image makeover

If you follow Hong Kong news as closely as I do, you may come across the feeling that Hong Kong people complain too much. That, of course, is not necessarily a bad thing. It shows how deeply many Hong Kong people care about the city they call home. Such care is a welcome change from the apathy prevailing in the past when most people just wanted to make enough money to move on to a more permanent abode. We call that the refugee mentality.

Now, emigration is no longer the priority in the minds of more and more young people who were born in Hong Kong. It is natural for them to want to make Hong Kong a better place to live and work. But some of them feel that the government isn’t listening, or simply can’t understand their demand and big businesses are, perceivably, working against them.

Their pent-up frustration, fueled by, among other things, the widening wealth gap and worsening air pollution, is the source of rising social tension that has manifested in open hostility toward the Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying and indiscriminate public protests against nearly all government policies. The sometimes insensitive comments from the property tycoons and financial moguls don’t help either.

Hong Kong people aren’t always rebels without a cause, as some politicians and commentators have wrongly labeled them. Many Hong Kong people are mad because they feel that the government, the business community and major institutions have refused to even try to understand what they really want.

It seems unfair to blame the government which is mainly led by career civil servants who are steeped in the time-honored tradition of the faceless bureaucrat. In that role, most of the administrators in the government are doing fine. Indeed, the efficiency and integrity of the Hong Kong civil service is the envy of many neighboring cities and regions. But politicians they aren’t.

One of the major problems the government faces is that it doesn’t always have people with sufficient political skill to talk to the people. The political appointees drafted from the private sector are mostly people from business or academia.

Hong Kong business leaders in property or finance are particularly ill-suited to play politics. No matter how well-connected in the business circles they may be, Hong Kong’s business leaders are mostly isolated from the public because there is never a need for them to heed public opinion in this pro-business political environment. As for the universities, they are never known to have contributed any useful ideas or effective solutions, preferring to keep a low profile except when they are called upon to fight for greater grants from the government.

The opposition politicians have no such problem. Although they are just as lacking in ideas and eloquence, all they need to do to gain political points is to pick up what the public complains about most and magnify that in the legislature, district councils and public rallies.

Our political leaders, including Leung Chunying, may need special training in public communications. They may have watched the movie Iron Lady in which the late Margaret Thatcher was portrayed to have gone through speech training and an image makeover before making the bid for party leadership. The fact that she won the election twice must have indicated that those efforts produced results.

We are not asking our politicians to be actors. But it is widely accepted that our politicians have an image problem. If they can’t even talk with some authority, how can they expect to convince the people to accept the policies they propose?

They all need help in speaking to the public and some may even require an image makeover. That is a small price to pay for more effective governance.